Missouri Historical Society's Recently Digitized Atlases and Guides

The StLGS monthly meeting on Saturday, 8 June 2024 featured Emily Jaycox, librarian at the Missouri Historical Society (MHS), and what a treat she brought us! Emily has given us permission to share some of what she presented to the group, which we are delighted to do, and we are sure that once you dig in to the items now posted on the Missouri Historical Society's website, you will be hard-pressed to leave your computer! Read on for all the exciting details.

If you have visited the MHS's Library and Research Center, you know they have a huge collection of maps and atlases, but, until recently, most were not digitized and only available by visiting the facility in person. During 2022 and 2023, the MHS received grants from the Missouri State Library, a division of the Secretary of State's office, which allowed them to begin the process of digitizing atlases and plat books from throughout the state and uploading them to the MHS's website. To facilitate using the newly digitized material, the MHS staff has created easy-to-use online "LibGuides," and those are what Emily introduced to us.

Most of what has been newly digitized are plat books from St. Louis City and County. As you probably know, the value of these books is that they show who owns parcels of land and exactly where the land is located at a given point in time. Unique to this collection is a form of plat book called a block book that shows land ownership block by block for the city of St. Louis. Even if your ancestors were not land owners, you can still get a picture of what their neighborhoods looked like, who owned the property where they might be renting or boarding, and where the schools, houses of worship, stores, etc., were located.

The first of three guides Emily shared was "St. Louis City and County Atlases and Plat Books: Digitized Plat Books," which features a table in chronological order linking to each of the plat books that are currently online. They range from the earliest known survey of the city done by Joseph C. Brown in 1829 to a set of National Occupancy Maps showing commercial real estate tenants in 1955. At the top of the page are a set of tabs (see the red arrow below) that explain in detail what plat maps are, how you can use them to tell stories, how Missouri's land was divided, and, for those with interest in city blocks, another table with links to block books from various years in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, although not all are digitized.

The second of the guides is "Digitized Plat Books," which is a table including books from the following counties:

• Bates
• Clay
• Gentry
• Grundy
• Jefferson
• Livingston
• Monroe
• Ray
• Sullivan

A link at the bottom of this table goes to the State Historical Society of Missouri's online collection for many other counties.

Finally, the third online guide is to "Finding Digitized Maps at the Missouri Historical Society." This guide walks through how to search for individual maps in the online collection. Because the online collection is so large, clicking on the highlighted yellow link on this page will take you to a search screen only for maps that are not in a plat book or atlas.

If you have ancestors from St. Louis City or County or other areas in the state of Missouri, this is a new resource you will want to explore. They will be adding to it as time and money allow, so you will undoubtedly want to bookmark the pages and return often to the MHS's growing online collections.